Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The New York Radio Message Board (NYRMB)

Do you listen to the radio? So do I. There’s a place online where people who love radio can talk about the industry in New York. The New York Radio Message Board (NYRMB) has been a unique institution since 1998, a place where professionals and fans chat, debate, and in many cases catch the eye of decision makers looking for ideas.

To be allowed to post on the NYRMB you have to send an email to the moderator, Allan Sniffen, who issues your password. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the board is that the moderator asks each poster in this mostly male board to use his real name. Most follow this rule and it leads to a higher level of civil discourse that any other board I have seen. Not much flaming goes on. Allan has been known to bounce people from the board for going off-topic.

Many professionals sign on and it’s a treat to hear the opinions of well-known radio personalities in an informal setting. For example, I’ve seen posts from Johnny Donavan, Big Jay Sorensen, Jay Diamond, and Cubby Bryant.

The range of topics this past week included the new Arbitron ratings, baseball on the radio, Opie and Anthony, and the move of WNYC’s studios. My own postings on the board have been about Imus, Whoopi, Boomer and Carton, Bob & Ray, and wherever I think I might have some fact to add to the discussion. I recently started a thread after a visit to my sister’s house to look after her cats. She uses a roof antenna and as I sat on the couch and channel surfed I checked out a topic that shows up on the board, Pulse 87, an FM station is actually VHF Channel 6. I heard the FM signal but was surprised to find that they were broadcasting a video loop of Texas wildlife. This generated some interest on the board as seen in this thread. Just spend 10 minutes on the NYRMB and you’ll learn something new.

· VHF Channel 6 (home of Pulse 87 FM) running wildlife video - Brian Black 19:20:40 04/22/08 (6)

Posted by Brian Black on April 22, 2008 at 19:20:40:

I'm seeing scenes of Texas wildlife and hearing hot dance rhythms on VHF Channel 6 tonight. Could Pulse 87 be testing in order to begin using the video carrier?

Thursday, April 24, 2008

John Adams on HBO

JOHN ADAMS flew under my showbiz radar until last month when I saw it advertised on a bus shelter. This looks like a good movie, I said to myself, one that I would pay to see instead of waiting for the rental. I was surprised to read in the ad that it was to be a miniseries for HBO. I had canceled HBO years ago after Chris Rock left his talk/sketch show and my kids were staying up later than me. Some of their late night programming is very raunchy.

Paul Giamatti stars as John Adams with Laura Linney as his wife, Abigail, David Morse as Washington, Stephen Dillane as Jefferson, Tom Wilkinson as Franklin, and Danny Huston as cousin Sam Adams. The nine-hour series cuts to the chase, the Boston Massacre (1770), so we lose the first 35 years of Adams life. I read the source material, David McCullough’s biography (which is enjoying a revival in paperback and well worth the effort to get through) and was surprised at first that, with nine hours, the producers chose to ignore the young Adams’ life that the author covered in great detail. But the choice to portray young America instead of young Adams is a good one as the period of American history from 1770-1800 is so interesting that it deserves the time devoted to it.

For most people, the presidency would be the peak experience of a life but for Adams, we see through Giamatti’s Emmy-worthy performance, a man living with the dread while he’s in office that history will not treat his term (1797-1801) as our second president kindly due to his nuanced stand between the perennial global rivals, England and France. We also see the very tender lifelong love story between John and Abigail, as history knows from their famous correspondence. The final episode also portrays another famous correspondence, the one beween between Jefferson and Adams. Both men became too old to travel in their post-presidencies and would write long thoughtful letters to each other about everything: their past achievements, the new republic, their places in history.

The best episodes are Part 3, in which Adams travels by sea and takes part in a battle against the Brits as he and his young son (future president John Quincy Adams) journey to France to get support for the new revolution; and Part 4, where John and Abigail are reunited and we see the events leading to the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the Revolutionary War.

Outstanding work is done by David Morse as Washington, who is played with a Mona Lisa grin on his face, or is it his bad teeth bothering him? Stephen Dillane as Jefferson is so good that I hope someone will think of him to play Jefferson again in his own miniseries. He’s the great enigma of American history, claiming all men are created equal but owning slaves. Many long shots of the Adams’ house show a white man working in the field, making a subtle point that Adams never owned slaves.

If you don’t have HBO, get it for this or rent it when the DVD comes out. You’ll be glad you did.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Free Ebook: Beautiful Children by Charles Bock; I Want my DTV

Free Ebook: Beautiful Children by Charles Bock

Beautiful Children by Charles Bock: how do you make a profit by giving 15,000 ebooks away? The Feb 2008 issue of Wired had an article about this new/old business model. You make up the loss in free advertising or in other products tied in to the freebie. For example, Wired reported that King Gillette sold the razors at deep discount and made it up on the sale of blades.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Well, Bill Gates told Homer you don’t rich by writing checks, as he busted up Homer’s Internet business. Ironically, Homer didn’t even own a computer. But the new/old paradigm of giving the product away has been a hallmark of the online experience. We take for granted free software (QuickTime, DivX, etc.) and that Adobe will always give away the pdf Reader, but what if they charged for it? Would the market respond and come up with another free reader? What if Adobe made pdf files proprietary? There was a rumor in the ’90s that Microsoft would buy Adobe and fears that we’d have to pay them every time we wanted to distill a pdf.

Tip of the Day: If you ever do read a book in Adobe Reader, here’s how I make a bookmark. I create a shortcut to the file, leave it on the desktop, and rename the shortcut with the number of the page where I left off.

I Want MY DTV

I finally got my $40 gummint coupon toward the purchase of a digital-to-analog converter for my old television. Come February 2009, these old war horses will need the converter box to pull in and convert the digital signal. As a member of the coop board, I have to recommend whether or not we should spend the money to upgrade the roof antenna and my test was very discouraging. I tried pulling in a signal many ways, using:

  • The roof antenna
  • The “turn your wiring into a giant antenna” device
  • An amplified indoor or fire escape antenna
  • A screw in my alarm system

Believe or not, wedging the tip of the coax into the screw gave me the best signal strength. However, the only channels I could get were 5.1, 5.2 (simulcast of Channel 9) 25.1, 25.2 (traffic camera channel), and a low power religious station on digital channel 3.1. It’s going to be weird to see channel 3 in New York if they stay on the air. I am recommending to the board to make the investment to upgrade the system and pull in these signals, which for the most part are from the old UHF band which was always hard to tune in. (Although I read that some channels after February 2009, such as Channel 13, may move back to the their old signal on the VHF band).

One of the knocks against digital is the all-or-nothing feature of receiving the transmission: no more ghosts. Another knock is how hard it is to get a signal in a fringe area. I’m on the second floor of the southern end of a six-story building and that’s certainly a reason why I’m not getting much of a signal. I can’t help but recall that the old analog VHF TV signal could penetrate thick walls but UHF cannot. Many people who are ignoring this conversion and who don’t have satellite or cable are in for a shock come February 2009. There may be a mad dash to Radio Shack or Cablevision or Dish.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Blockbuster vs. Netflix

I was going to write about the ongoing JOHN ADAMS miniseries on HBO but decided to put that off and jot down a few thoughts on Blockbuster vs. Netflix.

I’m a latecomer to the Peabody Award­–winning series on the SciFi Channel, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. The show is in its fourth and final season. I watched the last few episodes of the previous season last week and I’m familiar with the series plot just by keeping up with show biz news in general. After seeing the Season 4 premiere, I went to Blockbuster to catch up and get Season 1 Disc 1. I watched it on the laptop with headphones. Great audio and video production values and probably the best acting ensemble in science fiction television with veteran thesps like Edward James Olmos (Cmdr. Adama) bringing up the perfs of the less experienced crew members.

I went back to Blockbuster, which last week had the complete series on DVD, to get Season 1 Disc 2. The single copy they had was out. Usually I delay gratification, but I went home and signed up for Netflix and put BSG Season 1, Discs 2-5 on my queue, plus CURB YOUR ENTHUSUASM Season 6.

Netflix has also come up with a new killer app, as if having what Blockbuster stores don’t carry isn’t enough. Now you can download a subset of their selections on your computer via streaming, with no waiting for the entire film to load or clog up your hard drive. I tried it out and the program crashed when I tried to go full-screen on RED DWARF 8. I had just loaded the viewer so perhaps a reboot will fix this problem.

Blockbuster has its own Netflix-like mail service, which they started a little too late to catch up with the competition. I don’t know if the Netflix streaming service will increase their selection in the future but streaming gives them an awesome advantage over Blockbuster.

I recalled banking online with Citibank in the early ‘90s, dialing via modem in terminal mode, accessing their computer with a 212 number, lightning fast response for the most part. As the years went on, Citibank never lost their lead in sophistication over the other banks’ online services. Ironically, the service was faster on text only, 28.8K modems than on any modern graphic-laden browser. It was a sad day when they discontinued Direct Access. The program fit on a single floppy.

Blockbuster has been closing stores and for awhile it looked like they were putting most of their effort into starting up the mail service. Unless they make a strong response to Netflix’s streaming service, I don’t see how they will survive. If they do intend to keep the stores going, they should keep more than one copy of hot TV shows in stores, or find a way to check what’s popular and triage a few more copies in there. About half of the three seasons of GALACTICA was out. Like my old boss Mr. Ron Gettinger used to say when I ran the toy department in a small Woolworth’s, “Don’t ever run out of the Batmobile.”